Top Blank Slate Quotes

Favorite Blank Slate Quotes

1. "The brain is highly structured, but it is also extremely flexible. It's not a blank slate, but it isn't written in stone, either."Author: Alison Gopnik

2. "It's only at first sight,when the mind's a blank slate,that you get the purest look.So I fold the flap back,and write:Tumbleweeds."Author: Alyson Noel

3. "There is a picture of me in their heads, a picture of someone I don't know yet. She is not the chubby girl with the braces and bad perm. She is not the girl hiding in the bathroom at recess. She is someone new, a blank slate they have named beautiful. That is what I am now: beautiful, with this new body and face and hair and clothes. Beautiful, with this erasing of history."Author: Amy Reed

5. "I try and reduce myself to an almost blank slate and hope to God that I am creative."Author: Ben Kingsley

6. "A baby is such a blank slate, like training the understudy for a role you're planning to leave. You truly hope your replacement will do the play justice, but in secret you want future critics to say you played the character better."Author: Chuck Palahniuk

7. "The apartment was entirely, was only, for her: a wall of books, both read and unread, all of them dear to her not only in themselves, their tender spines, but in the moments or periods they evoked… Her self, then, was represented in her books; her times in her records; and the rest of the room she thought of as a pure, blank slate."Author: Claire Messud

8. "Whenever I finish a book, I start with a blank slate and never have ideas lined up."Author: Erik Larson

9. "Simply to render oneself able to understand what other Christian thinkers have themselves come to understand and to more or less felicitously communicate requires that one's mind not be a blank slate but already properly formed, disciplined, and exercised."Author: Gregory B. Sadler

10. "The desirable virgin is sexy but not sexual. She's young, white, and skinny. She's a cheerleader, a babysitter; she's accessible and eager to please (remember those ethics of passivity!). She's never a woman of color. SHe's never a low-income girl or a fat girl. She's never disabled. "Virgin" is a designation for those who meet a certain standard of what women, especially young women, are supposed to look like. As for how these young women are supposed to act? A blank slate is best."Author: Jessica Valenti

11. "I argued that the Bush administration, and the Coalition officials more recently, didn't understand Iraqi society. They thought it was a blank slate, that they could use Iraqis as guinea pigs."Author: Juan Cole

12. "My room is cleared. My head is cleared. Earlier, around dawn, I took out the last load of trash. I look around and see what's left. Nothing. There is no more Daelyn Rice. As I was. As I am. Or will become. I'm a blank slate"Author: Julie Anne Peters

13. "Some actors wear their roles like clothing," he said. "No matter what part they're playing, you can always easily see who it is beneath the costume.""It's how drag queens do women, darling," volunteered the elegant Miss X.[...]"The really amazing actors strip themselves down to nothing-they make themselves a blank slate, and you can never guess what they're going to look like or act like in their next film because they completely transform themselves.""It's how transsexuals do women, darling," opined Doris Fish with an arched eyebrow in my direction."Author: Kate Bornstein

14. "We are here to inscribe ourselves on the universe, and it is not inappropriate to remind ourselves of this when blank slates are given us."Author: Kim Stanley Robinson

15. "Just as television didn't put an end to radio or the movies (to say nothing of books), I don't think e-books will put an end to hard copies, even for someone like me who loves technology and does not fetishize the physical medium of books. ~ Steven Pinker, author of The Lauguage Instinct, How the Mind Works The Blank Slate and The Stuff of Thought: Language as a Window into Human Nature."Author: Leah Price

16. "I got to college and saw all of my friends going to these other schools and thought, 'You know, college is just a blank slate.' And I had an opportunity to go to different schools, but I chose Brown because it was unique and allowed you to be yourself as an individual and like I said, it's a blank slate."Author: Masi Oka

17. "People today will have you believing life is a blank slate upon which you can write anything at all--this is poetic, even romantic. Unfortunately, it's also a lie, because life exists in, is bound by, shaped by, controlled by, and functions within a construct. Attempt to function outside that construct, or bend it to our will, or remove it completely, and you throw all of society into chaos. We're seeing that now.Like it or not, birds don't fly upside down...and neither can we."Author: Northern Adams

18. "The great appeal of the doctrine that the mind is a blank slate is the simple mathematical fact that zero equals zero."Author: Steven Pinker

20. "It's not that I'm being shy. It's just that -- well, for one, I don't even remember the event. It's a blank: a white slate, a black hole. I have vague images, half-impressions: of being, or having been -- or, more precisely, being about to be -- hit; blue light; railings; lights of other colours; being held above some kind of tray or bed. But who's to say that these are genuine memories? Who's to say my traumatized mind didn't just make them up, or pull them out from somewhere else, some other slot, and stick them there to plug the gap -- the crater -- that the accident had blown? Minds are versatile and wily things. Real chancers."Author: Tom McCarthy